


i wanna be somebody to someone

by plinys



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, Femslash February, Femslash February 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-09
Updated: 2018-02-09
Packaged: 2019-03-15 17:40:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13618383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: Nyssa is born with words on her collarbone. Sharp black writing, in English, of all languages. A blessing and a curse at the same time.





	i wanna be somebody to someone

Nyssa is born with words on her collarbone. Sharp black writing, in  _ English _ , of all languages. A blessing and a curse at the same time.

Soulmates were rare. 

Rare enough to be kept a secret by the few lucky enough to have them. 

As far as the League was concerned a soulmate was either a terrible weakness or the greatest strength, all depending on whether the soulmate could be recruited among their ranks.

The alternative was death. 

She’s young when her words appear against her skin, when she stands in front of a mirror in her chambers, trying to make out the reflected letters, to stare down at a handwriting that doesn’t read easily. 

In a moment of weakness, she asks Talia to read it to her. 

Her sister staring down at the writing with a look of something, not quite confusion, but understanding. Almost recognition. That shifts to longing. Her sister didn’t have a soulmate. Something Nyssa knows Talia will grow to resent her for once they're both older.

“What does it say,” she says, not willing to dwell on the look in her sister’s eyes that she doesn’t entirely understand. 

Talia’s expression flickers back to neutral. 

Her voice almost bored and uninterested as she says, “Oh, finally.”

 

*

 

Everyone leaves. 

It’s a fact that Nyssa has long since accepted.

Her mother left -  _ dead,  _ gone.

Her sister left - for a man in Gotham that didn’t even have words to claim her and to a cause that she barely even believed in. 

Her soulmate - Nyssa traces the words along her collarbone whenever she was feeling lonely. Whenever her training felt like too much. Whenever another kill made her wonder if she was even human after all.

If she even had a soul at all.

She had.

Because there was someone out there for her.

Someone that was waiting for her.

Someone that would say  _ finally  _ when they saw her.

Nyssa had thought about them, dreamed about them, imagined what her soulmate could be like, this person that was another half of her. A woman, Nyssa hoped, any other alternative was… Death, she’d kill him to remove the attachment.

But a woman… She’d noticed the way the softness of the female form attracted her, in ways that the male form never could. She stares at the reflection of her soulmates words in her mirror, focuses on the handwriting, it’s not the neatest, messy and tilted slightly, but she could imagine it being a woman’s.

She could hope.

For a woman that wouldn’t leave like so many other have. 

 

*

 

Her father sends her out into the sea.

On a hunch.

On a prophecy that he’d heard years ago, when Talia was a young girl, and Nyssa not even an imagined possibility.

On an act of fate.

There’s words on the woman’s arm, the woman floating on driftwood, left for dead, words written in the ancient language that only the League uses. 

Later Nyssa will trace those words with her lips; the reassurance that she was safe now, that she had been found.

In the moment though, she hardly notices them, not when the young woman looks up at her with sunburnt cheeks and eyes red from the salt water and simply says, “Oh, finally.” 

 

*

 

Sara is perfect, made for Nyssa, in ways Nyssa didn’t even know one could be made.

Her laugh is the most beautiful sound that Nyssa has ever heard.

Her lips are so soft and sudden against Nyssa’s such that she forgets how to breathe.

Her hands are hot and desperate as they tear Nyssa’s clothes from her body.

Her body is built to move against Nyssa’s in perfect synchronization. 

Nyssa loves her.

How could she not?

How could anyone not? 

 

* 

 

Sara leaves.

Because of course she leaves.

Everyone Nyssa has ever loved has left.

But Sara comes back.

She always comes back.

After a fight, or an mark gone wrong, or a feeling of wanderlust inside of her very soul takes over - she always comes back whether it's the next morning or the next day or the next month. She’s there. Pressing a kiss against the words along Nyssa’s collarbone as an apology. Not a promise that she won’t do it again, but a promise that she’ll always come home.

Until she doesn’t.

Until Nyssa wakes up alone in bed.

Not for the first time.

Not for the last time. 

But to a searing pain like fire across her skin, a burn that is soul deep, that she can feel in her chest. Pinpricks of pain that feel like dying, but she’s not… When the pain stops. She is alone. And she is alive. 

And that somehow seems worse.

She does not have to look in the mirror to know that her words have faded. 

She felt it.

Felt the last good thing she had in this life leave her. 

 

*

 

She will ask, the words hardly a question, her arrow pointed at a man who was not completely blameless in all of this.

Not the one she is angry with though.

Not that one that stole her very soul from her body.

She knows before she asks that Sara is gone.

And yet still, she asks, the words she must ask, no matter how they hurt.

 

*

 

Nobody tells of how to live without a soulmate.

They’re so rare as it is, a blessing unique and gifted to so few, that there’s nowhere to turn to when the other half of her soul is gone. 

The League insists that this is natural. That this is how it should be.

Her father, who has only ever seen Sara as a weakness, encourages her to get her revenge, to use the anger inside of her to hurt those who stole her beloved form her, to channel that hurt into something that the League can use. He does not understand. He has never understood. His soul was not made for another.

Not in the way Nyssa’s had been.

Crafted by the very heavens for this. 

It does not feel natural.

It feels like pain and loneliness.

It feels like drowning.

A feeling that the echo of her soul once knew all too well. 

 

*

 

He is not her soulmate.

He is not her beloved.

She silently vows that if he dares to touch her she will kill him, maybe not now, maybe not on this night, but eventually. Inevitably.

But he does not.

The smallest of blessings, instead they sit upon what was to be their marriage bed and discuss the one thing Nyssa still feels a need for. 

Revenge. 

 

*

 

They made vows to each other.

Once upon a time.

Laying in a bed together, cramped in the quarters for the lowest ranking members of the League, bunks stacked together. Because her own quarters had felt too large and too much. She had prefered it on nights where her thoughts became too loud, to crawl in beside Sara on the small bunk, and imagine for once that she was not their  _ princess _ .

It was there had she had told Sara about the Pit, about her father’s dabbling with immortality, at the cost of his own soul.

They had promised each other then, that no matter what happened they would never touch the Pit, that it was not worth losing  _ their _ soul. The bond that held them together.

She watches in horror, years later, years that have felt like a lifetime - watches as the woman she once called her  _ beloved _ finds her life again. What a life it is. A shadow of what she once was. 

A pale imitation.

A monster that wears the skin of the woman she loved.

There is no burning against Nyssa’s skin. The words against her collarbone remain faded. Because  _ this  _ is not her beloved.  _ This  _ is not the woman that Nyssa had been made for. 

That woman is dead.

Gone. 

Knowing that, does not make this easier. 

She made Sara a promise,  _ her Sara _ , the one that was forever lost.

A promise that she had failed to uphold.

Destroying the Pit

 

*

 

She thinks that she might die here in this cell. It would be fitting.

In fact, she almost welcomes it. 

For all that she had ever loved is gone, and those that remain are… 

It burns. 

The skin of her inner wrist, a sudden feeling, so shocking that she breaks the stony silence and solitude that had marked most of her imprisonment. Letting out a sharp gasp that has the guards still loyal to her turning towards her cell with concern. 

She does not look at that.

She focuses instead on the feeling.

On the burning.

On the pain.

She had not felt pain such as this since the night her words faded from her skin, the night she lost Sara.

And before that.

She pushes as her sleeves, pushing them upwards with desperation and the need to see something. A familiar handwriting that she knew well by now, that she has traced against her collarbone for half of her life. That she had savored letters and mission reports written in that same handwriting as if they were love confessions even after the writer was long gone.

A handwriting that belonged to Sara.

An impossibility.

And yet, a reality.

Two letters, dark against the skin of her wrist:  _ Hi. _

 


End file.
